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This looks to have come out of a blockchain company: https://github.com/wasmi-labs/wasmi/blob/master/NEWS.md#anno...

I think smart contract execution is a good application of WebAssembly. It seems promising!

Wasmi is an independent project nowadays. And you are right that it was originally designed for efficient smart contract execution but with a scope for more general use.

I see it was included in the README. The other uses are also very interesting.

> It is an excellent choice for plugin systems, cloud hosts and as smart contract execution engine.

Would also be nice for a more dynamic sandboxed code running on mini home servers as something like https://sandstorm.io/

Most of the funded and innovative work on WebAssembly & co seems to come from various cryptocurrency/blockchain groups, for better or worse.

It's well suited for permissionless compute.

Only issue is, not all languages that compile to WASM are deterministic.

Yeah typically you cannot use garbage collectors nor multithreading in smart contract development.

Interestingly, Lua has GC and is deterministic if you replace the random hash seed.

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